Home Town
by Yuuki Hikari
Summary: First person Winry story. Her thoughts on the morning before Ed returned home to have his AutoMail repaired in episode 17.


**Home Town  
**  
From what I gathered, the weeks worth of rain was supposed to have lasted another few days, so why on earth the sky decided to let me wake to a vibrant, clear sunrise, I'll never know. Maybe it was an omen.

Mornings after rainfalls are especially nice; before 10AM the air is fresh, crisp, and best of all, cool. The day can heat up all it wants, that's what my overalls and tube top are for, but when you crawl out of bed and wish you could go back, it's a nice atmosphere to surround yourself with out on the porch. It's similar to a cold shower, only not so startling.

Granny cooked me breakfast; we were extra nice to each other all morning. The two of us had spent the previous day in a huff over an argument we'd had in the afternoon. I'd spent all weekend working out the schematics for a knee joint that would incorporate a new hydraulic being manufactured in Rush Valley; however, Granny said 'absolutely not' because it was still unproven quality and there was nothing wrong with the superiority of the Rockbell method as it was. I tried to explain to her that we shouldn't fall behind on the progression of AutoMail technology but I was promptly handed the 'this is my shop and you are my apprentice' line. Now, that line normally stops our arguments, Granny is right after all, this is her shop, but I'd spent so much time and effort on it; it had to deserve some merit of consideration, which she didn't give it. She's so stubborn that way sometimes.

That argument lasted all night, and only a fraction of our argument was verbal. Hours before the sun had set, we'd stopped talking; I'd locked myself away upstairs and Granny was off doing who knows what. I was already frustrated so I left the room in a disaster, which Granny hates, and went to bed.

For every time I've gone to put my head down for 'a minute' and been woken up hours later by Granny to 'clean the attic up' before the new day, this was the one anomaly in all that: when I walked in there the next morning to find out it was in the same state I'd left it in. Either Granny hadn't come upstairs or she'd simply let it be; I didn't want to ask but I made sure she knew it was appreciated when I went out of my way to tell her how good I felt that morning. Somehow I got bacon and eggs out of it.

I eventually locked myself away upstairs again, though not for the same reasons as the day before. Even if I couldn't have my hydraulic, I still had all sorts of parts Granny'd brought back for us when she'd taken her monthly supply trip the other week. There was a new 14.6-volt battery that I wanted to see if I could incorporate into a shoulder piece for power plus a new humoral rotator that had the potential for increasing forearm mobility. As good as AutoMail is, it's not flesh and blood, and so advances are always nice.

The hydraulic Granny… geez…

So, while tucked away in my attic with my hands deep in oil and grease, Den starts barking. It should have been the mailman since he always comes around about now.

I _knew_ it wasn't.

Maybe I knew because of how differently the day had started; the rain having washed away all that was wrong on the Rizembool landscape and the beautiful scenery I wake up to every morning coated in a thin, polished gloss as though it had been born anew.

Of course I didn't believe myself! I repeated 'it's the mailman' and went back to work. It wasn't Ed and Al, and even if I hoped beyond everything else to one day see them both strolling through the countryside again, I'd resigned myself to the idea that it may never happen.

Sure they wrote to me… well, Al wrote more than Ed. And even if Ed wrote it was hard to read, he didn't exactly have the best penmanship. But in those letters, never once had I seen them mention coming home; on the odd occasion I would get one, it would be 'Winry, you should come out to Central and visit sometime!'. From their point of view there was nothing to come home to.

Can't something be said for 'hometown'? That's what Rizembool is: our hometown. You're born there, you live there, you play there, you sleep there, and when you go away, you're supposed to 'come home' to your hometown. Since you cannot change where you were born and raised, you cannot change the place you ultimately 'come home' to either.

I changed my mind; I didn't want to be submerged in this goop. I wiped my hands, took on my gloves and decided to trim down some metals for later. The moment I revved up the machine Granny called my name. Her words shot into my chest and tore through me like a bullet; I knew and I couldn't deny it.

There was nothing I could do suppress the feeling lodged in my throat that I knew they'd come home, without being able to see their faces or hear their voices above the hum of the machine. Just like there was nothing either of them could do to change the place that they come home to when there's nowhere else to go.

For the next few minutes I stood up on the second floor balcony and watched the scene I'd hoped to see for so long. Ed never seemed to grow, and Al… I wondered if Al would ever be something I could get use to. But it was them, they were here and I stood there, a stupid grin slapped onto my face, watching in silence, until I realized… where the hell did Ed's arm go?

- FIN


End file.
